I apologize for the length of this, but maybe if you take the time to read it, you’ll see that I do have something interesting to say. Maybe you’ll choose to cut it down to publishable length and have the full text on your website.
To my editors and copy editors: I use the word girl here several times. I know that this is currently a very unpopular word, but I use it intentionally and with precision. By girl a mean a female human younger than 18 years of age; in fact, mostly I use it to refer to girls younger than 16. I beg you, please, do not turn my “girls” into young women. Similarly, please do not turn my boys into young men.
by Mike Christian
Professor William A. Percy’s claim that UMass discriminated against him in pay raises because of its alleged homophobia comes as no surprise to me.
15 years ago I took three courses with him, getting A’s in his two Middle Ages courses and an incomplete in one-I still have not written a paper for his Medieval Mind course. I also tutored for him for one semester.
At first, after just one course with him, Percy thought a lot of me, without hesitation letting me into his 400-level research-and-methods course as a freshman immediately after saying to the class that he wouldn’t let anyone below junior status into the course. When I was a sophomore, he spontaneously singled me out to ask, out of a half-full Lipki auditorium of one of his 300-level courses, to replace a grad student tutor for his Western Civ Two course, even thought I immediately told him that I’d never taken either Western Civ course.
Oh, for the halcyon days when I had Percy’s respect and admiration, the things a young man craves most from an older man . . .
My own “Percy experience” began with his Dark Ages course. I liked him right from the start, but a lot of my fellow students did not. One friend repeatedly popped bubble gum loudly in class to protest what Percy said. The problem was, Percy is a racist. He’s not anti-African American, not a vulgar racist, in fact he is quite sympathetic to blacks, but he does believe that genes determine the behavior of nations and the individuals who make them up, a belief common to people of his generation.
He told us that Germans had a racial propensity toward violence and atrocity. His evidence, of course, was first half of the 20th Century when Germans did do some terrible things. However, since we were not studying the first half of the 20th Century and were instead studying early Medieval Europe, his telling us all this was quite gratuitous. The fact that our class included three young, female German exchange students only seemed to increase Percy’s glee in lecturing us about German heredity sadism.
Percy was outraged when only 7 students pre-registered for his second half of his middle ages series, cause it to be canceled, something he said had never happened before. He said that he was the victim of a cabal lead by a few disgruntled students. He truly didn’t seem to to know how much many of his students despised him.
I have to admit that I admired him, enjoyed his courses and his lectures. I still regret not making the time to take his common law course. I used to share many of Percy’s worst traits. I didn’t think that German atrocities were caused by their genes, but instead I thought, and still believe, that the DNA of violence had been handed down generation-to-generation through their culture rather than their genes. Thus my own theory explains how the Germans, and the Japanese, can swing from peace-loving to war-loving within a generation several times over their histories, while Percy’s cannot.
Percy also believes that homosexuals are genetically superior to heterosexuals, that their genes grant them superior intelligence and talents. He wants society to recognize this alleged fact and to show gay people “obeisance”—his word, not mine—that straight people should show them deference and that in effect bow and kiss their rings or maybe even their feet.
I admired and shared his glee in telling people truths they didn’t want to hear. For more than a year I did that at this paper, through my opinion pieces. I have mellowed, gotten older and perhaps wiser, but I do miss doing it.
The downfall for me in Percy’s eyes began when I wrote an opinion piece in this august journal in which I mentioned, as an aside in a piece on tolerance, that a professor I didn’t name wished Roman Catholic clergy expelled from the campus ministry. That unnamed professor was Percy, and he became very angry with me. He saw it as an attack on him, that somehow I had intended to endanger him, since he said everyone knew that it was he who felt that way. He also seemed truly disappointed that I’d not named him. This is the key to understanding Percy: he craves attention, even infamy, but then acts the persecuted victim when people react badly to what he says.
I apologized to him several times over the years, explaining that I hadn’t thought about it when I wrote it, that I’d merely thought of it as an absurd example of intolerant tendencies on campus. I still regret having done it. I considered Percy a friend and a mentor, and I believe that I should not have so publicly used the believes of such a friend merely as an critical aside, merely to demonstrate something else.
As for my writing this new opinion piece, well, he withdrew his friendship long ago, and this is a direct attack rather than a glancing blow. Besides, as the visionary poet William Blake wrote: “Opposition is true friendship.” Percy never hesitated to criticize me, and I often found his criticism insightful and useful. I’m merely returning the favor.In other opinion pieces for this paper I argued that if tolerance and diversity were our new gold standards for our society, tolerance and diversity demanded that society tolerate—create social space—for people who believed homosexuality either immoral or sinful and publicly expressed that belief because these beliefs were an essential part of their culture. Percy avidly believes that such things should not be tolerated by our society.
At the time I did not think homosexual practices wrong, nor did I believe that there was anything wrong with homosexuals. It was really Percy himself who pointed me in that direction, and those beliefs only flowered in me after I was no longer in contact with him.
I’d never read Plato, but Percy has a habit of selectively quoting him—in fact cherry picking anyone famous he can—to support his own views on homosexuality—or any other views he holds, for that matter. Percy was my first introduction to Plato, so when I started reading Plato I expected to find—actually looked forward to finding—the things Percy had told us that Plato had written.
Of course Percy would never misquote Plato, but actually reading Plato came as a surprise to me. The more I read him, the more I loved him, and the more I read him the more I realized that Percy either intentionally distorted Plato or that he had somehow, inexplicably, grossly misunderstood him.Plato wrote philosophic dramatic dialogues, plays with characters, something Percy invariably failed to mention when he would tell his students that Plato wrote such and such, e.g., that Plato was against marriage, that Plato wrote that philosophy, pederasty (sex with pubescent boys), and nude gymnastics set Ancient Greek. high civilization apart from its barbarian neighbors.
Shakespeare didn’t advise “Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” one of his characters, Polonius gives this advice to his son, the character Laertes, in Hamlet, one of his plays. The fact that Polonius, however loveable, is a windbag seems to undermine the seriousness with which Shakespeare meant this advice, however wise it may seem on its face.
Percy never mentioned that the same character, Pausanias, in The Symposium, who links erotic love for youths with Athenian greatness also says that sex with boys before they grow beards should be illegal. Percy often told us that Greek pederasts preferred boys without facial and body hair and that they called that hair “thorns.” Also he never mentioned that The Symposium ends with the deus ex machina of the adult character Alcibiades’ drunken speech in which he says that as a boy he had tried and failed to seduce Socrates—Plato’s teacher, hero and, apparent mouth piece in his dramas—thus demonstrating Socrates’ perfection, his righteous self-control.
Percy also never mentioned that Plato’s Phaedrus says that highest same-sex couples will never have sex and that even the lower ones who are merely good will only do it once, and that only out of weakness.
In his book, Pederasty and Pedagogy in Archaic Greece, which pretends to be a serious work of history, despite exhaustively quoting every positive thing Plato—and the rest of the Greeks— wrote about homosexuality, Percy never quotes any of Plato’s negative comments about homosexual acts, dismissing all of them by saying that a lot of scholarly ink had been spilled on the subject of Plato’s true views on the subject.Plato’s attitudes about homosexuals and homoeroticism are nuanced and varied, and I infer that he believed that homosexual men are higher beings than heterosexual men, but he clearly sees sex between men or between men and boys as ignoble, much as one might, think drinking an enjoyable past time but also, without the slightest contradiction, think drunken vomiting disgusting. This statement may strike one as an extreme and even shocking, but if you carefully read The Symposium you will see that it is Plato’s comparison, not mine. To Plato, the coward, the drunkard, and the practicing homosexual have all lost self-control and plunged into debauchery.
The presence of an attractive young man excites Plato’s highest man, but that highest man would never touch a youth or another man in a sexual way. The highest man seeks immortality not through the body but through the mind, through his reason. To use Nietzsche’s term, which was obviously inspired by The Symposium and which Freud later adopted, the highest man sublimates his erotic desires. In The Phaedrus, Plato’s Socrates says that the younger man impregnates the older man, inspires him with beautiful speeches.
Percy tells his students that he’s in favor of lowering the age worldwide to 14, but it’s clear that 14 is merely a compromise for him, the best he can hope for at this time. A few years back, I audited two course at UMass, and Percy appeared as a guest lecturer in a Roman history course. He regaled use with tales of avidly seducing men when he was 12—the only way he “felt harmed was at being denied as much sex with adult men” as he craved.
That week Time magazine happened to have a cover story on early puberty in girls. Obviously angry, Percy dismissed it, since he said he’d been studying puberty for decades, in regard to pederasty, and said that Time’s reporters, and the doctors who had raised the issue, had only studied the issue for a much shorter period. Early physical puberty is a problem for Percy, since he seems to view sex, especially with pubescent boys, as merely a physical matter, something done with the body rather than the mind. But ever earlier puberty raises the issue of sex with ever younger children. For Percy, unlike The Symposium’s Pausanias, and most of us, it is not a question of mental or emotional maturity, although Pausanias is worried that the man who takes a boy as a lover before he has is old enough to have a beard runs the risk of taking an unsuitable lover, one who has not proven his promise, his intellectual and moral virtue.
In that same lecture, he even defended a Boston 27-year-old male transvestite accused week of raping an 11-year-old boy at knife point, saying that the police and prosecutors usually make such things sound worse than they were and that the boy had probably merely been caught having sex and lied—cried rape—to avoid being punished by his parents. (The boy and the transvestite had been discovered together in a car, and the judge in the case drew much fire and eventually lost her job for expressing views similar to Percy’s in the matter, except about the boy lying, and for merely sentencing the transvestite to house arrest.)
For good measure, Percy also told us that he’d heard that the transvestite was a student at UMass and that “he sounded like a very interesting young man,” and told us that if any of us knew him we should tell him that Percy was eager to meet and talk to him.
Percy claims to be neither a pedophile nor a pederast and I believe him. However, he clearly sympathizes with pederasts and wishes laws changed to protect them rather than children. He berates western industrial nations which have laws forbidding their citizens from having sex with children when abroad, since he claims to see it as a throw back to the days when the European forced weaker nations to try their citizens in those weaker nations under the laws and courts of their home countries rather than under local laws and courts. This is another Percy absurd sophistry. Percy wishes pederasts to be free to do what they want when abroad in poor third world nations when on child-sex junkets. I strongly suspect that he’d truly like to see the worldwide age of consent lowered to 10 or 11 for boys.
He rages against feminists for equating male age of consent laws to female age of consent laws. After all, a girl’s body must mature before she can do what straight men wish to do to her, but a boy’s body need not await maturation for what pederasts want. He’s fond of saying that anal sex is more fun with a boy than with a girl because of their different internal anatomies.
As guest lecturer, in the Roman history course, told us that he’d written much of a book on historic age of consent laws and practices in different cultures and societies, proudly showed us part of his manuscript, and he told us what he had been learned about Roman marriage ages. He said his book was intended to demonstrate that no harm was done by lowering age of consent.
When I attempted to point out that Rome was not a modern society, that Roman teenage girls lived in a society much more patriarchal than our own and probably had little actual responsibility, except in upper class households where Roman girls tended to marry much later, and that Roman teen brides spent years under the tutelage of their husbands and probably under the thumb of her husbands’ mothers and that they therefore needed much less maturity than modern sexually active people need, Percy simply talked while I talked but only slightly louder, a continuous noise so that my classmates would have had to separate his voice from mine in order to understand what I said.
This is Percy’s mode of censorship, something he only did to me that day in class, but it’s something that I’ve seen him do often in his courses. He only does it when someone persists in an intelligent object to whatever he’s saying, but he’ll always let an obvious fool talk as much as they want.Had I had the chance, I would also have pointed out that HIV-AIDS and even syphilis were unknown to the Greeks and the Romans, and that therefore a boy having sex with a man is much riskier now then it was then.
As well, Percy praised the classical of marriage-age practices and pederasty because they helped stabilize the population growth rates. I attempted to tell the class that these low population rates were due in large measure to female infanticide. Greek men married at a later age, after having had male lovers, first as boys with young men and then as young men with boys, and most girl babies were simply killed. By the time men were around 30 and ready to marry a 15-year-old girl, many men had been killed off in war or by other means, so there were far fewer men to marry the few girls who were lucky eno
gh to be spared infanticide.Percy, seeing where I was headed, jumped in and gave a mini-lecture on the Roman family, where the father had the right to kill his children at any age and decided which babies lived and which were killed, never mentioning that most killed babies were girls. Percy has very little concern for girls.My tutoring for him quickened my downfall. I was not a good tutor, but the problem was a different one. I had a girlfriend. This obviously surprised Percy. Later I heard through the UMass grapevine that he’d told others that he had thought that I was gay, even that I had intentionally “fooled” him by pretending to be gay. Why I would do that is beyond my understanding, and I would think that any honorable gay professor would be offended by any gay student who used his sexual orientation to gain some advantage. I was never in doubt about my grades back then in any of my courses, especially the ones I enjoyed.
Later still, I heard that Percy was telling his circle that I was in denial about my own homosexuality. Before I’d heard that, I remember his saying cryptically to me a few times: “Mike, my maiden aunt would say of you: ‘Well, at least you always have a girlfriend.'” I remember thinking, gee, so what? Percy’s belief that I was gay seems quite odd to me, since in the Medieval Mind course, a small, intimate class, I was quite smitten with one of my classmates, a woman, and I’ve always been incapable of hiding my attraction for a woman. Even my young nephews have noticed and teased me about it.My own behavior was not prudent. I was not a good tutor and few students came for my help, so I usually spent the time, in Percy’s office, helping my immigrant girlfriend—Chinese, not German—with her own coursework. Percy always called her “That Woman,” even though I’d told him her name several times, a one-syllable name that was a component of many English words.
He told me that he thought some students preferred to have me to themselves and didn’t come in when they saw me helping someone else. I tried that, having my girl not come to his office, but still few students came for help, so I soon had her back in there with me. I should not have done that, and I could have the time alone to do my own coursework or to read the many wonderful books in his office library.
Percy never made a pass at me, although he could have easily since we were often alone in his office, so I don’t think that he was disappointed in that way to discover that I was straight—or pretended to be straight or whatever ruse I was pulling—although the last time we spoke, other than that day in the Roman history course, he told me that he didn’t want to keep contact with me because he “only wanted friends who were out and secure in their sexuality.” He said that he was afraid that if something happened I might accuse him with rape or something. This was after I’d left UMass, so I was no longer his student. I’m 6 foot 4, then was lean but over two-hundred pounds, and many many years younger than Percy, so my crying rape would have been rather absurd. But Percy always knows best, always keenly discerns the truth through the thick fog.
Which brings up another interesting matter. Percy essentially believes that his students’ opinions are dismissible on their face, unless they happen to agree with his own—so in either case he need not listen to them with any attentiveness. He has the habit of saying to those of us who persist in disagreeing with him: “You must think that all opinions are equal.”
Like his comment about me “at least always having a girlfriend,” this comment long puzzled me. But later I realized what he meant. By this comment Percy does not mean opinion in the vulgar sense, i.e., a statement of taste, such as “the claim that ‘chocolate ice-cream is the best’ is merely an opinion.” Instead he means opinion in the sense of an unprovable belief about reality. Of course not all opinions of that type are equal since some are well thought out and based on sound premises and facts while many others are not.
He’s fond of saying that “Aristotle proved that all opinions are not equal” in this way. However, what Aristotle seems to have said it as a self-evident truth. I’ve read him, and I can’t find an agrument of his that even attempts to prove it.
However, what Percy really means is: “Your belief that your opinion is as good as mine—when I’m obviously a brilliant, wise and well-educated professor and you’re merely a student, and obviously not a bright one at that, since you believe that your opinion is as good as mine—is laughable.”
One of the problems of this line of argument is that one of the most important goals of a liberal arts education is to teach students not to accept the hoary dogmas of the past, but instead to think for themselves. It’s probably one of the main reasons that Plato wrote dialogues rather than philosophic treatises, since nearly all, when carefully read, contain logical problems and end inconclusively, facts I’m confident Plato intended. As a reader of Plato it is your job to find the contradictions and to think them through and to reason through to your own conclusions.
On thing that Percy style of argument shares with Plato’s Socrates is to argue both sides of the issue, since he minimizes his interlocutor’s opportunity to present his own side by never shutting up himself. However, Percy inevitably says that, since this is your obvious premise—even when it’s not—you must believe such and such absurdity. Percy, UMass’ own Jason with a bottomless bag of dragon’s teeth, never tires of slaying an army of strawmen of his own creation.
Percy prefers to discover and expose the underlying prejudices of anyone who disagrees with him and to dismiss them ad hominem rather than to discover and expose the flaws in their facts or their reasoning. However, if Percy were capable of listening to someone other than himself, I’d point out that if there’s something fundamentally mistaken about Darwinism, it’s the Creationists who are most likely to discover it rather than dyed-in-the-wool Darwinists. As well, Louis Leaky spent his life scouring East Africa for human origins because he was born and raised in Kenya, and loved Africa, not because he had a good scientific reason to do it. However, he did end up proving that humans originated in Africa, because of his prejudices rather than in spite of them.
I don’t know if Percy has been discriminated against in his pay raises because of his homosexuality. I have serious doubts about homophobia and antigay discrimination being rampant at UMass. However, I wonder if perhaps Percy is the victim of discrimination against vanity and arrogance. No, I take that back. Most professors are vain and arrogant. Me thinks perhaps that Percy is instead the pitiable victim of the rampant and widespread discrimination against those who lack the prudence or the temperance to control what they say and whom they say it to. I know that I’ve been a frequent and unfortunate victim of it too. So at last Bill, we are brothers under the skin after all. I suspect that you knew it all along.
Mike Christian is a former chief movie critic, opinion editor, and production manager of the Mass Media